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Tag Archives: inside sales

Inside sales: Playing by the numbers

By admin
October 4, 2012
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One thread that ran through the sessions at AA-ISP’s inside sales conference in Chicago last week was: 1384137682395. That’s right. 1384137682395. Dollars. Percentages. Rates. Ratios. “Batting averages,” even. Numbers. The language of numbers, thinking analytically and driving decisions based on numbers was a shared language throughout the conference. And numbers don’t have to be complicated; many lessons were simple but still powerful for sales productivity. Here are a few we heard: People need to receive an average of 6-7 lead nurturing contacts by marketing before they are sales ready. The close ratio of “buying signal leads” versus “tire kicker leads” is 8:1. Buying signal leads request pricing, demos and trials. Tire kicker leads download white papers and attend webinars. LinkedIn messages can return a response rate 3x more than email; LinkedIn InMail messages can return a response rate 30x more than email. Email stretches out sales communications and sales cycles from what could have been 5 minutes to 5 days or 5 weeks or more. Don’t hide behind email. Have conversations. Test different strategies for cold calls and initial conversations. One strategy may deliver 130 product demos while another strategy may deliver 390 product demos. Implementing tests and processes that …Read More

Caution: Leads may be hot. Handle with care.

By admin
July 13, 2011
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When you change your lead scoring and lead delivery using predictive analytics, don’t forget to train sales reps to think different as well. It’s well-known that salespeople don’t qualify leads, they disqualify them. The more leads provided, the faster leads seem to get disqualified and bounced back in the holding queue. Reasons could be due to lack of data (such as invalid or no phone number), bias (“can’t possibly be a large enough deal”), or simply attitudes (“the more I close out, the sooner I will find something that works”). This approach churns through leads, resulting in significant cost of acquisition and processing resources – both human and machine. If your reps’ closeout rate is 50%, your net cost is twice the initial cost! Marketers and sales leaders often respond by finding ways to deliver a greater number of qualified leads faster. Predictive models are often used to score and deliver ideal prospects from a larger universe into outbound lead gen programs. Predictive models increase productivity and the ROI of achieving specific outcomes such as getting appointments or sales, moving newly-acquired customers into repeat customers, and improving cross and upsell. But caution: predictive models may produce leads with characteristics that are …Read More

Why “call often” is like “one size fits all” — usually not the best fit for customers

By admin
November 18, 2010
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We’ve heard phrases like “call often,” “call everybody,” and “call until you get an order” espoused as sales and marketing strategies. But we should evaluate whether this approach produces the best ROI, particularly when cost per call is high. This is a key issue with sales productivity. Outbound calling has direct costs of the rep’s time, mileage and/or telecom utility costs, indirect overhead costs, and the opportunity cost of not calling a customer who would have ordered instead. Let’s expand on the last component and explore its role in determining sales productivity. Sales 2.0 is about nurturing and facilitating the buying cycle, even in a transactional sales model. Your B2B customer is buying what they need – technology products, office supplies and medical supplies for example – driven by the demand for their services and sales needs, not from their benevolence to your sales person, to borrow from Adam Smith the pioneering economist. In other words, a company that is larger, expanding faster, and experiencing increased end-consumer demand is simply going to buy more often. So when we apply an average – which is what a “call often” mandate implies – we aren’t putting the customer’s buying cycle first. This doesn’t respect the customer’s …Read More

How to increase sales force adoption of BI initiatives

By admin
November 18, 2010
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“We’ve tried that before.” “It’s too cumbersome and I don’t get much for the trouble.” “Yes, but that doesn’t apply to me (or my customers).” These are statements about business intelligence (BI) we’ve heard echoed by sales reps in a number of organizations. It’s no doubt an endless source of frustration to well-intentioned practitioners and sales managers who want to bring the science of data-driven decision-making to boost productivity on the front line. Like closing the deal in any sales setting, overcoming these objections requires forethought, meaningful engagement and putting the customer first – in this case the reps – when implementing a BI or analytical initiative. So, if you could get into their heads… what would the sales reps want? More dollars with same or less effort Provide tactical actions Streamline, simplify their workflow Let’s cut to the chase. Can the solution actually make them significantly more money, consistently, for the same or less effort? Offer specific, contextual and timely actions that reps can follow without doing a lot of thinking. Don’t make them pull data and run reports. Just like stock market recommendations – buy, sell, hold. Simple actions. Do not allow room for a lot of interpretation. …Read More